The puzzle ball folded outward, opening wider and larger, moving away from me as it pushed a passage into the Grey. I started to step into the passage, but a distant voice shouted and made me pause:
“Theseus had a ball of yarn to mark his path through the labyrinth.”
It didn’t look like another labyrinth, just a hallway, but so far very little of this had been what it seemed. I didn’t have any yarn, though. I put my hands into my pockets, searching for anything I could use and finding only the hard, cool tin in which I’d stuck the strand of Todd Simondson. I pulled it out and looked it over. The writhing end of his energy fluttered from under the lid.
I opened the tin and Simondson flowed out, confused by his surroundings but still pissed off. Before he could start demanding anything, I shushed him and caught a twist of his strand on my finger while I stuffed the second puzzle ball—Cristoffer’s puzzle ball—into my jacket.
“Stay right here,” I ordered the ghost of my murderer, and I started into the doorway, trailing his angry color behind me. Nothing and no one seemed to object.
The red illumination of Dru Cristoffer’s labyrinth faded until I was able to see only by the shifting ghostlight that defined the hallway I was walking down. I cast a glance back over my shoulder, but though I’d never made a turn, the way behind me bent and vanished into darkness. The deeper I moved into the mist, the quieter my head became. I could feel more, feel the energy of the grid running through me as if I’d bled out completely and my veins were full of the living fire of magic. But of the chorus that had invaded my mind both dreaming and awake, I could hear almost nothing. I twisted to the left and found another, smaller round room with no other entrances or exits.
This had to be the center of whatever labyrinth I’d just run. Keeping Simondson’s thread looped around my finger, I dug the other puzzle ball from my jacket even as I felt the grid nexus below my feet as strong and loud as before; I had moved and yet ended up in the same place. I fiddled with the key and felt it click into shape. This time it only made a dull whisper and opened the next ball with a grating noise.
There was a stink of recent, bloody death, burned gunpowder, and the ice-blue odor of anesthetic. For a moment the silence was so profound I thought I’d gone deaf. Then came the distant sound of bone spines chiming against one another and a train wreck’s screech moving sideways and away from me. I recognized the strange underwater babble from a dream, and still trailing the red light of Simondson’s ghost from my fingers, I stepped into utter darkness that unfolded from the second puzzle like a blanket of night.
TWENTY-FOUR
B
eyond the portal of the open puzzle ball, the darkness brightened slowly into the silvery mist of the Grey, but not quite as I’d seen it in a long time. This was more chaotic than I’d become used to. The mist itself writhed and swirled as if things churned unseen below its surface, things that pressed incomplete impressions of their form into the dark fog, turning up glimpses of faces and limbs that then sank away into the restless steam of the world between. Walls made themselves evident, the form of the maze composed of passing roils of gaping, half-formed heads and writhing limbs. The grid had ceased to sing and only the vague burbling remained. Here the power lines of magic had gone quiet and reverted to the empty wire-frame grid I used to know. Here was a corner where the Grey was hidden even from itself.
I followed the walls, staying to the left for two turns, drawing closer to the gut-wrenching odor. I came around a corner and into a small open circle: the middle of the last labyrinth. Here the faces in the walls made shrieking, gibbering expressions of torment and madness, but no sound came out of their twisted mouths. Off to my right, about the three o’clock position, a human form protruded from the wall, mostly free but not entirely. Part of the head, one arm, and the side down to the hip were undifferentiated from the cloud-stuff of the writhing wall that appeared to be splashed with dark-red gore. I recognized the odd medicinal smell under the death-stink: lidocaine, a contact anesthetic my father had used in his dental office. The figure in the wall turned toward me, twisting in an impossible way through its apparent skin.
I recoiled a step: It wasn’t that the head was imbedded in the wall, but that part of it was missing. And I recognized the too-fine hair and doe-brown eyes just a moment before he said, “Little girl . . . you made it.”
Part of me wanted to run to him and part of me wanted to scream and hide, but I just stood still and stared at him and felt my eyes grow hot and wet.
“Oh, no . . . oh, little girl, don’t do that. Don’t cry. There’s already plenty of blood and plenty of tears here.”
I stumbled a step toward him. “Dad?”
“I’m sorry you have to see this. I never wanted you to.”
“I understand that, Dad,” I said, wiping the ruddy tears off with my sleeve.
“Be careful. You’ve been clever—and lucky. You were always lucky, but now you have to be wise. Listen up, little girl—there’s not a lot of time. Don’t cry. Don’t bleed. It heals you, but this close to the web the power wants to flow freely through you. It’ll push every living thing out of you if you let it. I don’t want that for you.”
“Dad—” I started, but he cut me off with a glare that sent ice into my chest.
“Listen up! It’s the Guardian Beast he’s after. He’ll take its place—that’s what he means to do—but he has to have you to make the way. He needs someone to call it and someone to kill it and you to trap it between the Grey and the normal. And after that he has no use for any of you.”
“But . . . why would he want to
be
the Guardian . . . ?”
“He doesn’t want to guard anything; he just wants to take its place—that’s not the same thing. He’s like you: He’s becoming part of the living grid. But he doesn’t want to be sucked away into the song. He wants to
own
it, to control it. If he can displace and destroy the Guardian—”
A clattering and bubbling started up beyond the wall of silently screaming faces. My father’s eyes bulged and he looked panicked. “Oh, no. . . . They’re coming back. . . .”
The mist-world began a gentle heaving.
“You have to go. I don’t want you to see . . .”
“But Dad, how do I get you out—”
“You can’t. They’ll know. You mustn’t tip your hand until the last minute! This place is hidden, but if it’s empty, they’ll know.” He twitched and pulled into the wall a bit, letting out a gagging sound. “Please go! Now! Listen to the song. Don’t trust it, but listen. It will tell you what it needs, but you must know when to refuse or you’ll be swallowed up. Draw close; command it; then turn it on him when he’s vulnerable. Don’t let him become the Architect of the Grey. Use the second door—this puzzle—from wherever you are. It will bring you straight here so long as the first door is still open and then . . . and then you can do what you have to. Carry the ball and key with you until then and protect them well. Anyone can use the door but only you can stop the plan. Oh, no. . . .”
He jerked back into the wall until only his left side and the destroyed top of his head remained. All the faces in the wall opened their mouths and screamed as the blood above them began to run. . . .
I wrenched myself away and bolted back the way I’d come, blind in sudden darkness, reeling up the scarlet gleam of Simondson’s thread as I ran.
I fell out of the portal that had been the second puzzle ball, tumbling and spinning to swipe at the misty shape of the opening, trying to force it closed and cut off the shrieking that roared out behind me. Desperate, I stabbed the key at the incorporeal door and twisted as if locking the thing closed.
The mist slammed shut with a red gust of magic that knocked me to the ground as the chorus of the grid shouted back to life in my head. The puzzle ball, now closed again, rolled against my side, and I scooped it up, turning and looking for the next door while shaking my head, trying to clear the ringing in my ears that the voices made.
But the first door was gone and I was crouching on the weedy grass of the Rose house’s labyrinth as the red light of Cristoffer’s magic seal faded. Simondson’s tangled red shape glowered from where I’d left him beside the other puzzle, which lay open and scattered into a strange figure that gleamed with every color of the rainbow and showed the flickering phantom of the shape Dru Cristoffer had painted on the ball in blood and fire, hovering in air. If I turned just right, I could see the door.
Thinking of my father’s instructions, I left the puzzle ball and its weird door as they were and tucked the other one deeper into my jacket along with my father’s key. I would want them later. . . .
At the distant edge of the clearing, Quinton turned away from staring at the trees and ran toward me. “Harper!”
Simondson spat an ember of fury into the ground even as he twisted with pain. “When—?”
“Soon,” I snapped back at him. “One more trip and you’re out of here, but first you stand guard over this. Anyone comes to close this door, you scare the hell out of them.”
“Me?”
The clamor, the fatigue, and my fright made me snappish. “You’re a ghost, damn it! Don’t you think you can haunt someone here with all this power to use? Just look! It’s like a dead-guy playground here. Just fade back and wait.”
Simondson peered around and spotted the shadow bear in the distance. He grinned, an expression that was truly disturbed. I snapped the tin closed on the end of his red strand of existence and buried the other in the ground at his invisible feet, feeling the surge of the grid into my fingertips as I did. “If I call you, you come; otherwise, it’s all yours.” I could see him wiggling into the banked fire of the nexus and tugging the monstrous bear around like a toy. The sound he made in the unnaturally still air carved a frozen track of horror into my guts.
Quinton pounded up and swept me into his arms. “Thank God. I thought you were lost!”
“I had Simondson to get me out.”
“He makes an ugly guide.”
“He makes an ugly guard, too. Let’s get out of here before the bear notices us. I think Simondson has plans for it, and I don’t want to see them.”
This time we simply ran through the ruins, didn’t even bother with care or delicacy; Dru Cristoffer’s traps were designed to drive people out, not keep them in. We stayed a hair ahead of the storm of dead avians and animals that rose to pursue us. I was glad of the foresight that had made me park the truck pointed toward the road.
Quinton and I dove into the Rover’s front seats, slamming the doors behind us, and the cloud of reanimated birds splashed against the truck’s metal and glass, dissolving into dust and feathers. I started the engine and jerked the truck into gear, pulling away fast enough to raise the litter and dirt into the air in a plume as the remains of ghastly crows and jays sloughed away on the wind of our passage, the bones of dead deer, cougars, and bears scattering across the road.
I tossed the puzzle ball into the back as I drove, needing both hands free. I wanted out of the town of Leavenworth as quickly as possible. Quinton divested himself of his pack, coat, and hat more slowly, putting them behind the seat and frowning all the while.
I felt wound tight and ready to break. My mind, my thoughts, seemed to have been tossed into a blender with the emphatic blaring of the Grey to chop it all fine. At the bottom of North Road, Quinton urged me to pull over.
“Why?” I asked.
“I know you didn’t get any sleep. If you’re ready to head straight back to Seattle, it might be better if I do the driving. The trip out wasn’t a picnic, remember?”
“True.”
“Besides, you haven’t filled me in on what happened in there.”
I’d become so used to Quinton’s presence by my side in the past few days that I hadn’t given much thought to the fact he’d been locked out of the ghostly labyrinths. My father had implied that non-Greywalkers could use the second puzzle ball as a gateway to the hidden bubble of Grey just as well as I could, but Quinton had been cut off behind the wall of Cristoffer’s magic.
I unbelted and swung out of the driver’s seat. “All right. You drive and I’ll talk.”
I gave him the details of what I’d seen and what I’d garnered from my father—so far as I could since a few points about the possible living, collective nature of the Grey and the grid still refused to come out of my mouth. Quinton looked concerned when I got to the bits about Wygan’s intentions and my guesses on why I was suddenly crying blood.
“So . . .” he started, keeping his eyes on the mountain road we were traveling. “According to your father, you’re sort of . . . becoming part of the flow of magic. And you think you cry blood and bleed light because the . . . pressure of magic pushes into your system whenever there’s an opportunity. Because it’s trying to flow through you.”
“Roughly, that’s what Dad seemed to be saying, and if he’s right about what Wygan’s up to and my part in it, that kind of makes sense. Carlos said I was starting to warp the fabric of magic, or would, and that fits with what Dad said and . . . with what I’m observing.”
“Run through that again. I’m not sure what you’ve observed and what’s just my guess. You said you hear voices. . . .”
“Maybe I’m just losing my mind. Cristoffer wasn’t the first to suggest that Greywalkers go crazy. . . . Marsden gouged out his own eyes. . . .”
“That’s a little extreme. And while it’s possible that you’re cracking up, it’s not a complete explanation. I saw some of this stuff myself and I met that . . . woman, Cristoffer. I can still feel those things crawling up my legs. . . .” He shuddered.
“I wish you hadn’t had—”
He put a hand on my knee for a second before driving demanded it back. “I don’t blame you for anything I’ve seen or experienced. Don’t take it all on yourself. You know what they say: Shit happens.” He made a silly face at me and I huffed a laugh.
“All right, all right: It’s not all my fault. Some of it’s Wygan’s.” I could hear the hate and disgust in my voice for a moment, but Quinton said nothing about it.
Instead he said, “And a lot of other people’s. So . . . voices, doorways, dead dads, and Wygan wants to be the Guardian Beast. Sounds like a pretty crappy job. . . .”
“Only if he plays by the rules—and you can bet he won’t. Dad said something about his becoming ‘the Architect of the Grey’ and I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds like it’s not a good thing.”
“No, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be, not if it means no more Guardian Beast to keep the nasty stuff behind the veil. Any ideas on freeing your dad?”
I shook my head, eyes closed against both the shocks of passing ghosts and the plain weight of sleeplessness. “None. I think I’ll have to work that out on my own. He doesn’t want me to attract any attention by letting him go, but that implies there’s a way. I can always try it on Simondson first. Oh! Simondson . . .”
“What about him?”
“I left him . . . standing guard on the labyrinth. So far as I can tell from Dad, I can use the second puzzle ball as a direct jump back to my father’s bit of the Grey labyrinth as long as the first stage remains open. I’m not sure how it works, though. . . .”
“Some type of magical entanglement would be my guess. I suspect the puzzle balls have a similar relationship once they’re open and operating that entangled subatomic particles do. And there may be a series of points between them that are congruent in space-time, effectively making the puzzles doorways to all of those as well as any point one of them occupies. It’s possible that other paths in the second ball’s maze lead to other points of congruence in the Grey. Good thing you had that little skein of ghost to mark your way or you might have gotten lost and popped out in the wrong place.”
“I owe you for suggesting it.”
“I didn’t.”
That gave me a hollow feeling inside. I’d heard a voice distinctly and imagined it was his. . . . I shivered and didn’t want to think more about what had spoken. I would have to be very careful about which advice I listened to in the Grey from now on. But I did have an idea. I’d have to discuss it with Carlos, but I thought I had a way to put him out of Edward’s—and therefore Wygan’s—control without their knowledge that it had happened. I didn’t like my part of it, but if I was going to stop the Pharaohn’s plans, I needed Carlos on my side, free to act, not compelled to obey.
In spite of the sun suddenly piercing into the Rover as we headed down the western slope of the pass, I fell asleep somewhere east of Monroe and stayed out until we were past Edmonds, just north of Seattle. I woke up to the smell of hamburgers.
I blinked and rubbed my face, trying to clear the sleep and soften the noisy babbling of the grid in my head. “What’s this? Where are we?”